Does this blog post title sound confusing? If yes, then I have to admit it is intentionally written to sound confusing. I made it confusing because this is how I felt after reading about the so many names and naming combinations I heard about Dynamics Porals, ADX Studio portal recently acquired by Microsoft, Dynamics Portals by Microsoft and Microsoft Portals SaaS module.

To clear this confusion, I found this comparison on Adoxio website to be helpful to clarify the confusion:

For those who don’t know, Adoxio is the consultancy part of ADX Studio that Microsoft didn’t acquire.

So to clarify, Adxstudio portal were up to versions 7 before Microsoft acquired them.

Once Adx code was acquired, Microsoft rebranded it to Portal, from Microsoft. This is the new SaaS Dynamics Portal from Microsoft which is normally included in your Dynamics 365 Enterprise subscription. This is also known and referred to as: Microsoft Dynamics Portals, Microsoft Portals for Dynamics 365 and few other permutations. This dynamics portal is only available in the cloud (SaaS) and is not available for on-premise

Microsoft has then decided to release the source code as a one-off release to the Dynamics community. This is the release of the Microsoft SaaS portal source code at a specific point this year but as mentioned, it is a one-off, as is with no support or bug fixing. You can understand more from the comparison in the image above.

Finally, Adoxio has taken the Microsoft Open Source Portals code and made it freely available on GitHub as XRM Portal community edition so that it can easily be downloaded, updated, and maintained by itself and anyone else, including other Microsoft Partners. This represents the definitive edition of Microsoft Open Source Portals for Dynamics 365 brought to you by the same team behind ADXStudio. xRM Portal community edition is available to be used both on-premise and cloud.

Hope this post has clarified the confusion between the various versions and the new promising XRM Portal community edition.

I can’t say a lot more than what Microsoft has announced in this regard. The full source code of Dynamics Portal was released though so you can take it and use for your on-premise version – albeit without official MS support.